Call for Christian response to climate change

The first ever ecumenical event on climate change is taking place this month, looking at the Christian response to environmental issues and practical ways to empower the Church to the threat posed by global warming.

Mission Earth

"Mission Earth- A Christian Response to Climate Change" is taking place on the 21st April in York Minster. The event is being organised by the Christian Census on Climate Change (CConCC), a steering group that originated from grassroots Catholic groups in the Middlesborough Diocese.

The event aims to get Christians thinking about their relationship with the environment, and what the Biblical response to issues of global warming and climate change should be. Spokesperson for CConCC Emma Casson said:

"We're very excited about the event, it is the first its kind. The day aims to get people thinking about 'their place in the world'. We hope to empower believers to see themselves as 'custodians of God's earth'- that if "God so loved the world", so should we!

We also hope to address the perceived apathy in some parts of the Church by dealing with scepticism and giving people ideas for practical application in their own neighbourhoods and beyond. "

The day will start with a service led by the Archbishop of York Dr John Sentamu, and will be attended by the Catholic Bishop of Middlesbrough. The service will also feature speakers from leading international environmental and developmental organisations including Tearfund and Operation Noah.

During the day, a series of workshops and seminars delivered by Tearfund, Christian Aid, and CAFOD, will look at topics such as the science and risk of climate change and communicating climate change within the Church. It will also cover practical environmental projects, such as turning the churchyard into a haven for plants and wildlife, and establishing waste recycling projects in the community.

Emma said: "Going forward, we would like to see this initiative taken into the wider community, embracing a multi-faith approach. We would love to work with other faiths to take the issue of addressing climate change and global warming as far as possible.

After all, it's the responsibility of all us, not just Christians to take care of the planet."

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Jonathan

Posts: 2

Either they've not yet picked up on the fact that the earth's temperature hasn't risen since 1998, or maybe it's an 'inconvenient truth' that gets in the way of a tree-hugging jamboree. Either way, it's yet another colossal waste of time and resources, deflecting the church from its true mission of making Jesus known to a world that's perishing.

Hi Jonathan, what if you are wrong? The accepted scientific view is that the climate will warm significantly as a result of human activities and that we are just beginning to see this effect. It seems a bit rude of me, but could I ask what your credentials are that mean you know more than 97% of active climate scientists that accept this? There is a lot of mis-information out there and I do appreciate it is hard to know what to believe. Regarding the trend in temperature try this: Draw a striaght line sloping upwards across a piece of paper. Make the line quite wiggly. You should notice that although the general trend is upwards there will always be points above and below the line that could be taken out of the context of the general upward trend to "show" the opposite trend. Weather is by nature chaotic and any two data points - e.g. 1998 and today, will not give us a fair picture of what's going on. I too believe the church should be making Jesus known to the world - and one of the ways we can do that is by living differently to "the world" - in a way that isn't destroying creation, and to say why. Why not come to the York event with an open mind?

Check the 97% figure, Ruth. It's a fallacy. Worse, it's a deliberate distortion of the facts. The number stems from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. The survey results must have deeply disappointed the researchers - in the end they chose to highlight the views of a subgroup of just 77 scientists, 75 of whom thought humans contributed to climate change. The ratio 75/77 produces the 97% figure that is often quoted. The two researchers started by altogether excluding from their survey the thousands of scientists most likely to think that the Sun, or planetary movements, might have something to do with climate on Earth - out were the solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists and astronomers. That left the 10,257 scientists in disciplines like geology, oceanography, palaeontology, and geochemistry that were somehow deemed more worthy of being included in the consensus. The two researchers also decided that scientific accomplishment should not be a factor in who could answer - those surveyed were determined by their place of employment (an academic or a governmental institution). Neither was academic qualification a factor - about 1,000 of those surveyed did not have a PhD, some didn't even have a master's diploma.
To encourage a high participation among these remaining disciplines, the two researchers decided on a quickie survey that would take less than two minutes to complete, and would be done online, saving the respondents the hassle of mailing a reply. Nevertheless, most didn't consider the quickie survey worthy of response -just 3146, or 30.7%, answered the two questions on the survey:
1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
The questions were actually non-questions. No scientists claim that the planet hasn't warmed since the 1700s, and almost none who think that humans haven't contributed in some way to the recent warming. Quite apart from carbon dioxide emissions, few would doubt that the creation of cities and the clearing of forests for agricultural lands have affected the climate. When pressed for a figure, global warming sceptics might say that human are responsible for 10% or 15% of the warming; some sceptics place the upper bound of man's contribution at 35%. The sceptics only deny that humans played a dominant role in Earth's warming.
Surprisingly, just 90% of those who responded to the first question believed that temperatures had risen. One would have expected a figure closer to 100%, since Earth was in the Little Ice Age in the centuries immediately preceding 1800. But perhaps some of the responders interpreted the question to include the past 1000 years, when Earth was in the Medieval Warm Period, generally thought to be warmer than today.
As for the second question, 82% of the earth scientists replied that that human activity had significantly contributed to the warming. Here the vagueness of the question comes into play. Since sceptics believe that human activity has been a contributing factor, their answer would have turned on whether they consider a 10% or 15% or 35% increase to be a significant contributing factor. Some would, some wouldn't.
In any case, the two researchers must have feared that an 82% figure would fall short of a convincing consensus - almost one in five wasn't blaming humans for global warming - so they looked for subsets that would yield a higher percentage. They found it - almost - in those whose recent published peer-reviewed research fell primarily in the climate change field. But the percentage still fell short of the researchers' ideal. So they made another cut, allowing only the research conducted by those earth scientists who identified themselves as climate scientists.
Once all these cuts were made, 75 out of 77 scientists of unknown qualifications were left endorsing the global warming orthodoxy. The two researchers were then satisfied with their findings. Sorry, but I'm not, and neither are an increasing number of others who are waking up to the fact that we've been misled.
Unfortunately, in another bid to appear 'relevant', the church has jumped on a bandwagon without first checking whether the wagon has any wheels.

Saturday, 7th April 2012 at 9:38PM

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Rev'd Doodes

Posts: 1

So good to see that Christians are picking up this problem en mass, for too long the mainstream Churches have avoided mentioning the damage caused to God's Creation when Christians should actually be in the vanguard of those protecting it.

I have a degree in Environmental Studies so I do understand the debate around climate change issues. I also have indepth knowledge of how environmental lobby groups work. Having thought through and looked at much of the evidence for anthropenic global warming, my conclusion is that the environmental lobby is, at best, crying wolf and, at worst, being hysterically alarmist. Remember that similar environmental lobby groups were predicting mass population 'culls' in the 1970s due to overpopulation, calling for Shell to decommission its oil platforms without knowledge of the damage this would cause and predicting the end of the world on a regular basis. There is no doubt that there is some effect from mankind's effects on the environment, but whether it is irreversible is not possible to say. So, Christians, I think need to be measured in their approach and be part of the solution. Not, as Tearfund, seems to have done, start banging the secular global warming drum. Sad fact - environmentalism is a big industry and we need to be careful we are not taken in by secular forces, without neglecting to care for the environment.

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